Indigo turned two years old on Wednesday. For her gift we did an extra agility lesson mid week. We worked weaves, contacts and start lines. For the contacts our teacher had me click for Indi's front feet hitting the ground while I moved ahead of her and she stayed on "target". Then the release word and I tossed her ball back to her to reward for position. We tempted her with a tunnel right after the A-frame and she held position perfectly. Such a good girl!
We worked a few challenging weave entries and she got them all.
She still has a tendancy to knock bars but I don't obsess over it. The fact that she'd rather do agility
than almost anything else is more important to me than keeping every bar up. Her enthusiasm is definitely contagious.
Then we went home for a second gift. A cardboard box.
Joy
Who needs new toys when there's cardboard?
JOY!
To finish the day, a piece of salmon with birthday candles in it!
Rye waits patiently on the couch for the theatrics to be over so he can have some salmon.
To top it all off I got news that a photo I had entered in a calendar contest had won! We received the calendar today and Indi is "Miss April" for the Idaho Humane Society's friends for life calendar!
Today I was reading through a list of blogs written about aging in agility, here is a link if you wanted to go read. http://dogagilityblogevents.wordpress.com/aging/
It made me nostalgic and a little sad, thinking about Rye. I had to go watch some of his old agility runs on youtube. My goodness he was fast! Not always but sometimes! He was also nervous and that made him do things like run out of the ring to go find my husband on more than one occasion. A definite sign of stress. He had his moments of greatness though. Here is a favorite run.
Now we've gone so long without practicing that he can't weave 6 poles!
He sleeps very soundly. So soundly that I came home the other night from going out to eat at IHOP with sausages for the dogs, walked through the house to find him lying on his bed in the back room sleeping. I walked right up to him and held the sausage under his nose to wake him up. I wish I had my video camera! Quite adorable.
Even on our regular hikes he walks on the trail behind me more often than he goes out into the sagebrush.
I was starting to worry about him, his heart mainly. I took him to work for blood work and to have the vet listen to his heart. His murmur has not changed at all so that is great! He has no obvious arthritis, just less range of motion in his front wrists than normal. And his blood work came back completely normal. Very very happy.
So I guess he's just getting old. He'll be 13 in February.
I bought him a new toy, and Indi can't touch it. It stays in it's spot until we go to the park where Indi fetches her ball (over and over and over) and Rye plays with the Weiner Bear.
The Weiner Bear, body of a weiner dog and face of a bear...
Give me my Weiner Bear
An older video of Rye playing with a Kong frisbee. Definitely see a difference in energy! This was almost two years ago. Now he still does his adorable happy dance with a toy but for like 5 seconds and then he lays down with it.
Last weekend we took the dogs on a short vacation to Stanley, Idaho. We stayed in a hotel and hiked around Stanley Lake. Rye never once walked behind me on the trail. What is up with that? Is he bored of his home foothills that he has walked probably hundreds of times? Was he just invigorated by the new smells? Whatever the reasons, I was happy to see him having so much fun!
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